Hybrid Drive's small flash capacity

[the gremlin]

Building a budget PC for my dad right now, and he wants SSD performance for his OS but the same size as his current pc, 1TB.

Figured this is a perfect time to get a hybrid drive, although I'm a bit confused with how small some of these drives' solid state capacity's are.

64 bit Windows 10 takes up 20 gigs, which isn't nearly small enough to squeeze on the 8 gigs of SS I'm seeing on these drives.

 

If not even a full OS can fit on these, what is their purpose?

Does the drive not need to store the entire operating system on the flash sector to take advantage of it's speed?

 

Or am I just looking at the cheap end of the hybrids and I should be looking at some with 32 gigs of SSD?

 

Thanks for the learning~

 

[themctipers]

It caches files on the SSD but keeps most of it on the hdd.

 

 

just get a 250gb SSD and a 1tb hdd and tell him to put his files on the hdd 

[BlueChinchillaEatingDorito]

Hybrid drives have been a complete failure in my opinion. They were overestimated on what they can do; as a result, the entire product category fell flat on its face. It's a much better investment to get a SSD and a HDD for mass storage. Since SSDs continue to go down in price while HDD pricing have essentially plateaued, there's less incentive to bother with a Hybrid drive.

[GDRRiley]

5 minutes ago, BlueChinchillaEatingDorito said:

Hybrid drives have been a complete failure in my opinion. They were overestimated on what they can do; as a result, the entire product category fell flat on its face. It's a much better investment to get a SSD and a HDD for mass storage. Since SSDs continue to go down in price while HDD pricing have essentially plateaued, there's less incentive to bother with a Hybrid drive.

I have 1 friend who has it and he is happy with it. They are overestimated but if you play 1-2 games a lot it can be good or if you use it lightly 

[Mighty_Miro_WD]

Hi @the gremlin!

 

The hybrid drive are a good option for laptops where you have only one drive bay available and you want to have bigger capacity for your budget. I personally won't use them in a PC because having a dual storage configuration (SSD+HDD) will be faster.

Basically hybrid drives blend HDD capacity with SSD speeds (the small flash capacity you've mentioned) by placing traditional rotating platters, and a small amount of high-speed flash memory on a single drive. So a hybrid drive only has a certain amount of fast storage (cache) for commonly accessed files, which means that the files within this cache are accessed at SSD speeds while the rest are accessed at standard HDD speeds. If you go with a SSD and a HDD, you can choose what to run faster (OS and most demanding programs on the SSD, for instance) and what not because you'll skip the algorithm part (mass storage on the HDD).

Hope this helps and feel free to ask any questions you may have.